The Stanford University Libraries have acquired the source code files for the first on-line virtual world, MUD1.

MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) was created by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978 at the University of Essex. It was a text-based multi-user environment inspired by and loosely based on then recent text adventures such as The Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. MUD remained in continuous existence for over twenty years and also spawned a variety of other MUDS, related classes of games such as MOOs (Multi-User Dungeon, Object-Oriented), as well as 2D and 3D game and virtual worlds. It is still possible to play a version of the game today via the British Legends collection.

The donation of the source code files follows an earlier donation in 2004 of Dr. Bartle's papers related to MUD1, which areavailable for research in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford. With the generous permission of Mr. Trubshaw and Dr. Bartle as the copyright-holders for MUD-1, Stanford will be allowed to provide on-line access to the MUD1 source code files - details will be forthcoming.

Here at Stanford, the Cabrinety-NIST project is nearing the end of its two-year term.In addition to migrating data from original media and creating photographic documentation, a major aspect of the final phase will be to find and reach out to copyright holders who own the rights for software in the Cabrinety collection. Although we have made contact with some of the major publishers, there are still a significant number of titles for which we have not been able to identify rights holders. Discovery of rights holders is a difficult and time-consuming process.For many of the items in the Cabrinety collection it has been nearly impossible to determine whom to contact. As a result, we are publishing this open letter here on the HTGG blog.

This year’s Game Developer’s Conference was the most attended in the history of the conference, with more than 24,000 people descending on the San Francisco Moscone Center from March 17-21, 2014. There was something for everyone. If you wanted a hands-on experience, the MADE (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment), the Videogame History Museum, Wild Rumpus, and the Indie MEGABOOTH showcase all offered playable games in their exhibit spaces. Feeling nostalgic about classic game titles? There were game postmortems for Zork and Robotron: 2084, plus a first-ever studio postmortem for Lucasfilm Games. Two of my favorite sessions from last year were repeated—the GDC Microtalks and the GDC Rants, where ten speakers are given about five minutes to talk/rant about a topic of their choice. If you wanted something a bit more in-depth, advocacy sessions and roundtables addressed complex issues ranging from gender equality to government funding to game preservation. The IGF Awards and the GDC Choice Awards honored game developers both old and new, and best of all, the GDC Choice Awards were hosted by a woman for the first time—Abbie Heppe, who is the community manager at Respawn Entertainment, and who I coincidentally worked alongside many years ago when we were both editors at Tips & Tricks Magazine.

If you are interested in an opportunity as a project archivist in the Silicon Valley Archives, please visit stanfordcareers.stanford.edu and search for position 61637. You can apply for the position from there.
Processing Archivist, Gordon Moore Papers, Stanford University Libraries, 61637.
Description

The Moore Project Archivist is responsible for reviewing current organization and metadata for the Gordon Moore papers (approximately 150 linear feet of manuscript and audio-visual material). The incumbent will be responsible for recommending access and delivery strategies based on privacy and preservation and copyright issues. The archivist will organize and describe the papers while also reviewing and screening for sensitive and restricted material. The archivist will work closely with the Head of Technical Services/Special Collections and the Curator for the History of Science & Technology, and on an as needed basis, with the donor or representatives (Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation), the Chemical Heritage Foundation or Intel Corporation.

Duties:

MANAGE: The Project Archivist is responsible for the appraisal, arrangement and description (cataloging) of all formats of material in the collection - through a variety of programs, as well as publication and dissemination. Materials in these collections range from paper-based (photographs, notebooks, papers, meeting notes, correspondence, oversize materials, etc.) to audio, video, computer media, and digital files.

I've been working with the Cabrinety collection for a year now. However, the collection has been part of Stanford for more than a decade. I am far from the first person to handle it and I won't be the last. For my last blog post of this year, I wanted to spend some time talking about the man behind the collection.

Stephen Michael Cabrinety was born in Sayre, Pennsylvania on August 4, 1966. He started collecting microcomputing software, hardware, and related materials while still in high school, and continued making acquisitions for the rest of his short life. In 1982 Stephen dropped out of Stanford University and founded Superior Software, Inc. where he served as its Director of Development. Superior Software, Inc. released three educational software titles for the Apple II computer in 1982. The titles are listed below along with their locations within the collection:

The following is a guest post by Christopher Fox, a student employee at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For over four years, Christopher has provided NIST’s National Software Reference Library project with data entry services and the application development demands that support those services. He is currently completing his senior year at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where he is earning a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. He started working on the video game software part of the Cabrinety project when the group hit a dead end trying to collect data from gaming cartridges. Since Chris enjoys gaming and found a way to collect save data from older games for his own purposes, he offered to explore and share methods of extracting data from these obsolete formats.

Disclaimer: Trade names and company products are mentioned in the text or identified. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor does it imply that the products are necessarily the best available for the purpose.

The Institute for Museum and Library Services announced its September 2013 grant awards yesterday. You can read the announcement here. I am very pleased that the IMLS awarded a three-year National Leadership Grant for Libraries to a project called, "From Descriptive Metadata to Citation: Building a Framework for Search and Communication in Game Studies" that will be carried out by a team from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Stanford.

This project continues the close collaboration between these teams that began earlier this year with a Digital Humanities Startup grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a methodology for archiving software development, with a focus on the special archival and documentation requirements for software developed in universities and other research-centered institutions.

The IMLS-funded project will be a major activity of the How They Got Game project over the next three years, in close collaboration with the lead team led by Noah Wardrip-Fruin at UCSC. In a nutshell, the project will deliver a metadata scheme for digital game software, including ontology and terminology, in the first two years. Year three will focus on related scholarly apparatus, especially citation (including citation of in-game events). Obviously, this will be an ambitious undertaking, but it is also a necessary one for a whole host of activities from game acquisition and preservation, through discovery and access and on to scholarly use.

Earlier this year, Matthew Kirschenbaum posted an article to Slate where he listed what he considered to be the 10 most influential software programs of all time, based on his own personal experience. Out of curiosity, I compared his list to the contents of the Cabrinety collection, and found that out of his list of 10, there are currently 4 titles (or versions/adaptations of those titles) represented. Thanks to Stephen M. Cabrinety's foresight, some of these now historical titles are also in pristine condition. These are shown in the images below.

Programmers today fight an uphill battle to keep their skills current, as changing technologies and constant advancements make it nearly impossible for even the most adept computer scientists to stay ahead of the curve. In today’s videogame market, coding and shipping a game as an amateur requires incredible discipline, as self-taught and independent game developers need to attain a level of expertise and make a time commitment that is well beyond the reach and/or willingness of the average person. Just watch Indie Game: The Movie (currently available on Netflix streaming and the official movie site) to see the toll the creative process takes on the individuals behind bestselling indie games Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Fez.